


Lost Time

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Classic Mulderditch, Community: xfficchallenges, F/M, Foot Massage, Rain, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 15:26:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18471736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Time passes differently in airports.





	Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: indeterminate S7  
> A/N: For the Fic is Medicine Challenge at xfficchallenges on Tumblr.  
> Disclaimer: No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

There are times she wishes she could go back to Oregon, back to twenty-four-year-old Dana Scully with her hands braced on her hips like punctuation, her ponytail curling against the back of her neck in humid wisps. Time is a universal invariant. She would shake herself until her smug little teeth rattled like improbable dice. Not in this zip code or any other, little agent. 

Time passes differently in airports. Most of all it reminds her of the giant plastic funnel in the mall with its bold sign proclaiming THE COIN VORTEX in unbalanced serifs. She and Charlie would run to roll pennies down its calibrated ramps. Seconds skirl past as she sits by the luggage retrieval, chasing each other around and around the flue of her mind with leisurely gravity before dropping inexorably into some undiscovered well in her soul. It's like she can feel the chink of each one as it impacts, individual moments sliding across the accumulated heap. Clink. Clink. Clink. In the background, the poorly maintained conveyor belt heaves and creaks under the weight of other people's luggage. 

She sits next to her tidy little bag and watches families haul past suitcases crammed with Disney merchandise and beach souvenirs. The nametag from the conference at which she was speaking is still in her jacket pocket. She pulls it out and gnaws at the tip of her finger with the alligator teeth of the clip. 

Mulder is late. 

She's not going to call him. Clink. Clink. The seconds mound up inside her. Clink. Clink. Clink. When she shifts in the hard plastic chair, they scatter and rattle against her hipbones. She feels heavier inside the longer she waits. She had never plumbed the depths of herself before this job. She has more strength and more capacity to tolerate the mysteries of the universe than she imagined, but her patience is not infinite. Time still weighs on her. 

After half an hour, her hand slips into her other jacket pocket for her phone. All unbidden, it presses the single digit that she has programmed in as a shorthand for his number. For him. Mulder is 1. Tall. Stooped to reach her. No sense of balance. Not prime but primal. Her phone burrs in her ear. The call goes to voicemail. She hangs up. She has her dignity. 

She sent him the information. She left a printout on his desk, added the event to his calendar. "Pick up Scully." Mulder is always looking up. It seems he ought to have seen her plane land. 

After forty-five minutes, she calls him again. Same number. Same blurred tone. Same dead end. She hangs up again.

After an hour, she stands up slowly, shifting the aggregate heft of the time inside her, and walks to the Metro station. She'll have to call a cab, but a body in motion is happier than a body at rest, at least when that body is hers: the uncomfortable truths one learns after years in the Rube Goldberg machine of the X-Files. She feeds bills into the machine and lets the machine print a paper ticket for her. She has a permanent plastic card, but it's too much to think of fumbling in her wallet. She wedges her bag under her knees and stares out the window at nothing.

She should be angry. Mulder, for the some round significant numberth time, has ditched her. There is no carriage for the lady. Another sign of his unearthliness, his untethering from the petty concerns of the earthbound. He drove her to the airport, cracking sunflower seeds between his bicuspids and weaving a narrative out of fifty different mystic threads like a taller Rumplestiltskin. He promised to pick her up. Instead the train rocks and rattles underneath her as it carries her through the underworld, the pressed sediment layers of history bored open for the convenience of the throngs. Everything in DC is just short of well-maintained, including the government. Even the Library of Congress, even the files she's meticulously relabeled: the sheer volume of history around her obfuscates its truths. She navigates the city not by the stars, but by the clean lovely classic lines of monuments to men who owned people. She plunges through the earth on rails laid over bones. They are all habituated to walking through ghosts. 

She lets the motion of the car lull her and picks apart her own thoughts, slicing into her mind and propping its metaphorical ribs open. The lack of ire at her perpetual abandonment is surprising, like a clean tox screen on a suspected addict, but she has to interpret the results she gets rather than those she expects. What she is instead is wistful. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to come for her, to sweep her up in the swirl of his coat and stake her out her in view of the traveling public. I am claimed. 

The warped and flickering reflection in the plastic window shows her lips parted in surprise. She doesn't often indulge in thinking this way, imagining the public affirmation of Mulder's usually clandestine attentiveness. Now, tucked into the third or fourth hard plastic seat of the day, all she wants is to be in his car, tipping her head obliquely on the headrest to trace his profile with her eyes. 

He's waiting at her apartment building when she climbs out of the cab she took from the closest Metro station. He takes her suitcase from the cabbie, all solicitous grace. Boyfriendly. She suppresses the flutter of her heart. Twenty cc's of common sense into the cardiac muscle. Grey clouds jostle overhead, as frisky and balky as calves at a gate, peering at her. She has emerged from the gentle oblivion of travel: overhead, underground, removed from the world. She inhales the humid freshness of the breeze and lets it press the last traces of stale recirculated air from her lungs.

"How was the trip?" he asks. The wheels on her bag press lines into the damp leaves on the sidewalk. It's rained while she was in limbo, and the season has turned almost imperceptibly, shaking the boughs as it passes. Stray drops patter down from the trees. 

"It was fine," she tells him.

"I'm sure they valued your expertise," he says, looking up at the gravid clouds as she punches in the code for her front door, as if he doesn't know it.

"They asked a lot of questions," she tells him as they step inside the building.

"Well, you've trained for that," he says with a wink. 

"I missed you," she says.

His grin is bright, conspiratorial, infectious. "I missed you too. Sorry I wasn't at the airport. Skinner wanted something."

It is an apologetic non-apology. Neither Schrodinger or Heisenberg could make much of it, unable to verify either the sincerity or the veracity of his excuse. Still, she forgives him. He is confessed. He is absolved. The rain will wash them both clean. As she unlocks her front door, she can hear the dappling wet begin again. The light in her apartment shifts as the clouds swell and drop. Despite everything - the blood soaked into the pad beneath the carpet, the scratches in the paint on the vents from Tooms' incursion, the fragments of glass in the mulch underneath her window - the space is cozy, lightly scented with sage and lemon. She has learned to claw back her things from the clutches of trauma: candles, her overstuffed couch, her bathtub, her partner. Her life. Her heart.

"Come in," she says, a foregone conclusion, but one that holds more promise now. Time is not a universal invariant. She can pull taut her tidy little stitches, all the moments she's saved over the years not being in love with him, and turn them into something lovely. She can spend with profligate decadence from the hoard of moments that's dragged at her all day. She turns as she pulls the key from her lock and he's watching her. Out of season, something blooms inside her.

"All right," he murmurs, his voice scraping lightly against some prehistoric susceptibility still programmed into her medulla oblongata. Respiration, circulation, her need for Mulder: all autonomic functions, beyond her conscious control. She steps into the apartment and out of her shoes with a sigh, bracing one hand against the armoire. Mulder presses in behind her, a one-man crowd still towing her suitcase.

She makes tea. That's what she does when it rains. Scale rattles in the bottom of the kettle as she fills it from the faucet. She should clean it soon, replace the herbal scent of her candles with the bite of vinegar steaming through her kitchen, but she's weary, prizing comfort over scoured perfection. She can hear Mulder hanging his jacket by the armoire and setting her bag by her bedroom door. Funny how willing he is to cross all her metaphorical thresholds, but when it comes to the physical, he has cotillion manners. He's been sprawled insensible in her bed, white gauze against his warm golden skin stopping up a wound she gave him and tended to, but still he nudges her suitcase until it rests delicately against her door and saunters back to her.

"Tea?" he asks. She nods and reaches into the cupboard for a number of boxes. 

"Peppermint," she says, tasting the crispness of the consonants on her tongue. "Oolong. Jasmine. Earl Grey." She brandishes each one at him and sets them on the counter. 

"Peppermint," he says decisively. "Although, technically, Scully, a blend that doesn't include the cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis bush is a tisane."

"We aren't all Oxford-educated psychologists," she says. 

"Celestial Seasonings is a cult," he tells her, sprawling into one of her kitchen chairs. Mulder can sit straight as a ramrod and still sprawl somehow, but this is louche, possessive, his arm slung over the back of her Windsor chair. He sits in her chair like he might invite her to sit on his lap. She wonders if it's intentional. Mulder doesn't always understand his effect on people. Mulder doesn't always understand his effect on her, specifically, despite the overclocked interrogative processes of his mind. 

"Care to elaborate?" She presses the knob in, turns it until it clicks and the flame ignites. She half-listens as Mulder rambles on, dropping citations to esoteric publications, mentioning names she won't remember until some other fact tugs at the twanging filaments of her schema. Working on the X-Files has given her a mind like a spiderweb: every idea filters through her, snagging against the relevant threads until she can apprehend it and sip it dry. Meanwhile Mulder, neither noiseless nor patient, spins his yarns and weaves them around her until she's swaddled in his narratives, transfixed.

Scully leans against the counter. She's sat too long today. The longer she stands, the more she feels the leaden weight of waiting soften, melting down her legs and slowing her feet. It feels as if she is reclaiming those moments; every task takes three times as long to do, borrowed back from her store of lonely minutes. Rain lashes the window and drums on the roof. The gravelly racket from the kettle is a fitting soundtrack to Mulder's tales of conspiracy and herbs. He looks at her, expectant. 

"It makes sense," she says. "No well-balanced person could concoct Raspberry Zinger."

"A delicious conspiracy," he intones solemnly, gazing at her with those bosky eyes.

The kettle whines. It gives her an excuse to look away from him. Surely immediate domestic concerns like water boiling override the temptation to let herself be captured in the fairy rings of his irises. The kettle insists, the sound rising to a squeal as she snaps off the flame and pours the water into two cups. The tea bags bob just beneath the surface, leaking ochre. She nudges one toward Mulder, who rises from the chair and leans over her, a breath too close for professionalism, to retrieve it. She cants her body to escape his orbit and retires to the couch. Mulder joins her, lounging at the other end, the weight of him as palpable as the ballast of time she's slowly shedding. 

Scully laces her cool fingers around the hot mug. Ever since Antarctica, she's relished the heat despite the way it stings. Her baths are too hot, leaving her rosy with her hair in ringlets. Her coffee scalds her tongue. Mulder winces and sets his mug on her coffee table, then casually pulls her feet into his lap and kneads his knuckles along her arches as if it's something he does every day. His fingers are warmer than usual as he presses into the complicated countertension of tendons and fascia, residual heat from the tea. 

"Mulder," she starts to say, but all that comes out is the em in a soft sound of pleasure.

"I know this doesn't make up for ditching you, Scully," he says, "but I promise this time it wasn't my fault. Skinner trapped me in his office with some rookie who needed help with a profile. I told him that I had to go, but he reminded me that my continued employment with the federal government depends to some extent on fulfilling his whims."

"Did you tell him you were leaving to pick me up?" she asks. 

"For some reason, that didn't compel him," Mulder says, digging into a tender spot until she gasps a little. "I did catch him picking up his car keys. Maybe he wanted to be the one rubbing your feet."

"I thought the massage was an act of contrition," she says. 

"If that were the traditional apology for ditching someone, I would have been kneeling at your feet years ago," he tells her. "Maybe I should have been."

"Then why are you rubbing my feet?" she asks.

He shrugs and imprints circles around the bone of her ankle with the soft pad of his thumb. "Indulging myself."

The afternoon drags past like wet silk, brushing over her skin instead of piling up inside her in a hoard of compounded disinterest. Scully sips at her tea, or her tisane, or whatever the hell it is, relishing the contradictory fresh heat of it as Mulder smoothes the fatigue out of her feet. The mesh of her pantyhose makes webs between her toes. She is become a suburban cryptid, a soccer mom type with a secret. Mulder purses his lips and blows into the interstices to make her shiver. 

"Indulgence isn't your usual modus operandi," she says at last, drowsy and refreshed. 

"Mm?" He looks up at her. "What are my regular symptoms, Doctor Scully?"

"Flagellation," she says idly. "A guilt complex that verges on narcissistic. Melancholy."

"Maybe I need my humors balanced," he quips.

"I can dig up some leeches if you're feeling bilious," she says. 

"All the more reason to do my penance," he says. "Prostrating myself before you. A thousand Hail Scullys and a few hours of foot rubs are a small price to pay for my mortal soul." He ducks his head in contrition. Dark stubble ruffles down his neck. She wants to chafe her fingertips against it, or the soft skin of her cheek. He's due for an appointment with the clippers.

"It's going to take more than a few hours of foot rubs to avoid the leeches," she corrects him. 

"Exact your toll," he says. "Five minutes for every minute you've spent waiting for me sound fair?"

She snorts. "You're negotiating yourself into a lifetime of indentured servitude at that rate." 

"There are worse fates," he says lightly.

"There are better proposals," she parries. 

"Are you asking me to marry you, Scully?" His voice is low, the cadence of his words deliberately provocative.

"Of course not," she counters. "I can't depend on you to pick me up from the airport, much less meet me at the altar and be with me for better or for worse." 

"At least we've already gone through sickness and health," he says, releasing her feet for long enough to rap on the veneer of her table and then resettling himself. "But you have a point." He strokes the tops of her ankles down to her toes, his long fingers grazing delicately along the slope of her foot. "We'll have to settle for a lifelong bond less sanctioned by the priests of the world."

Outside it's still raining. They are cordoned off from the rest of the world by grey and damp in a moment that will be dissolved, resolved, absolved. Après ça, le déluge, and their confessions will evaporate like holy water, returning to some abstract plane. Scully sets down her mug. 

"Is that all?" she asks casually.

"An eternity of contrition," he says. "And my best attempts at punctuality. Although between you and me, I think Skinner did it on purpose."

"Are you saying he's trying to come between us?" She hums as he resumes his ministrations.

"He's been trying to come between us for years," Mulder claims.

"The true conspiracy," she says. "The question is, which one of us is he after?"

"A conundrum for the ages," Mulder says. 

Scully rests her head against the couch cushions, her eyes drifting over Mulder's face as he devotes himself to kneading her calves. His downcast lashes smudge his cheekbones. He is cast half in shadow by the rainlight, a moody portrait of devotion. She lets herself be weary, lets herself be cherished, lets time slip past without marking it. Some moments are eternity. She will find all the minutes she has lost, someday, in this infinitely variable universe.


End file.
